ELECT ARTURO ALAS TO CONGRESS. HE IS AGAINST NSA SPYING AND IS PRO CONSTITUTION. – Video


ELECT ARTURO ALAS TO CONGRESS. HE IS AGAINST NSA SPYING AND IS PRO CONSTITUTION.
Arturo Alas is against spying on innocent people and believes the government has gotten too big. The incumbent who he is challenging voted to fund Isis terro...

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ELECT ARTURO ALAS TO CONGRESS. HE IS AGAINST NSA SPYING AND IS PRO CONSTITUTION. - Video

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Cyber Spy High: Meet the NSA's Hacker Recruiter

The National Security Agency has a recruiting problem.

Rocked by the Edward Snowden disclosures and facing stiff competition for top talent from high-paying Silicon Valley firms, the nation's cyber spy agency is looking to recruit a new generation of college hackers and tech experts. And through one new program, the agency is cultivating students as young as eighth grade.

The man the NSA has turned to for help solving its recruiting problem is an avuncular 32-year NSA veteran named Steven LaFountain, who has been tasked with building up a "cyber curriculum" for tech-savvy students at 20 to 25 American universitiesand making sure a steady flow of top minds continues to go to work for the nation's technical surveillance agency. Officially, its known as the Centers of Academic Excellence in Cyber Operations program.

Recently, CNBC sat down with LaFountain in a conference room at NSA's National Cryptologic Museum, next to the agency's sprawling headquarters in Ft. Meade, Maryland, to talk about recruiting in the post-Snowden era.

What follows is an edited transcript of that conversation.

CNBC: So explain the impact of the Edward Snowden disclosures on your ability to recruit.

LaFountain: Actually, I don't think it's been damaging to our ability to recruit talent, in that many of the students that I talk to, anyway, that I interact with, they're interested in the tech. They're not bothered by, let's say, the politics of things like that. They're interested in the technology. They want to get into cybersecurity. They want to learn what we do here.

CNBC: How do you prevent yourself from being the guy who recruits the next Edward Snowden?

LaFountain: That's a good question. We have other processes security process that look into backgrounds and polygraphs and all that, and hopefully that will prevent that. You know, when I'm recruiting, I'm looking for the technical talent. I'm looking for the people that have the right mind-set, that question things. That don't just say, 'That's how it's supposed to work, so it works that way.' You've got to question: 'How can I get it to do things it's not supposed to do?' That's really what the whole cybersecurity business is about.

CNBC: Post-Snowden, the analysis was that part of the challenge for the NSA was that this generation of technologically-savvy students shares a different ideology than previous generations of boomers and Gen-Xers. These young folks today are much more libertarian, they're much more of the information-wants-to-be-free mind-set. Are you finding a different mind-set among the 20-somethings that you're recruiting now?

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Cyber Spy High: Meet the NSA's Hacker Recruiter

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Meet the NSA's hacker recruiter

CNBC: So what you do at work stays at work?

LaFountain: Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. A lot of our people still have their own home systems. They've got to keep it to what they're allowed to do on their home systems.

And actually, if I can, I'd also like to mention we've created a new program just this past summer. We've come to the realization that we need to reach back further than college to get kids interested in cybersecurity. A lot of studies show that by the eighth or ninth grade, kids are either turning to STEM or they're turning off from the STEM fields. And so we want to want to get more of them interested cyberspace. So just this summer, in partnership with the National Science Foundation, we created a program we're calling "Gen-cyber," sponsoring cyber-related summer camps for middle and high school students and teachers around the country. We call this our prototype year. We had six camps. The reaction was overwhelmingly positive. One of our camps had 172 high school students in it. I visited the camp; I talked to about 25 students. Every one of them said, 'This is great. It's better than I expected. Can't wait to come back next year.'

CNBC: What do they do in these camps?

LaFountain: What we ask the camps to do to start out is just to give students the fundamental awareness of cybersecurity so they understand the threats that are out there on the Internet and basic things that they should do to protect themselves. Some of the camps did some more technical things. Some did introduction to secure programming. Another program did an introduction to wireless networking and wireless security. And the students are really, really into it.

CNBC: Those were eighth-graders?

LaFountain: Those students were 10th-graders that did the wireless, but it was kind of cool. Because they had all this equipment, and they did a wireless scavenger hunt, so they had backpacks using the little antennas coming out of the backpack. They're going around this college campus trying to find these rogue access points that had been set up. So it really was just giving them a good introduction to that technology, which is an important technology today. So that's a program we hope to grow in the coming years. To eventually reach out to all 50 states, I hope.

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CNBC: How many students do you think you need to pull into the NSA in order to keep the pipeline flowing?

LaFountain: My estimate would be for the specific skill areas that I'm trying to build, it's in the small hundreds. And that's why you know in our program we intend to keep the number of schools fairly small. We're thinking maybe 20, 25 schools will be enough to provide the pipeline of students that we need.

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Meet the NSA's hacker recruiter

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Ex-NSA director Alexander calls for new cybersecurity model

Small and medium-size U.S. companies should band together on cybersecurity systems as a way to pool limited resources against increasingly sophisticated attackers, the former director of the U.S. National Security Agency said Tuesday.

U.S. companies should explore ways to share more cyberthreat information with each other and work together to buy cybersecurity defenses as a service, said General Keith Alexander, who retired as director of the NSA and commander of cyber defense agency U.S. Cyber Command in April.

For smaller companies, I think were going to have to go to something like cybersecurity as a service, where they can opt in, Alexander said during a cybersecurity discussion in New York City hosted by PwC. If the small and mid-sized companies are grouped together, where its economically feasible to give them a great capability, then they arent the downstream problem for the large banks. In fact, they become a part of the sensing fabric that helps protect the big banks or big industries.

Many large U.S. businesses would probably continue to provide their own cybersecurity, but a shared cybersecurity service would hold major advantages for smaller businesses, said Alexander, who co-founded cybersecurity consulting firm IronNet Cybersecurity just weeks after retiring.

There are big companies that can afford big cybersecurity teams, have the funding to pay for them, he said. Then, if youre mid-sized, you can afford to have a mid-sized team or lesswell call that the economy team. If youre a small [business], you know what cybersecurity is, and wish you had some. You have ... an IT guy who went to a class at night.

Alexander, during his speech, largely sidestepped the NSAs surveillance of U.S. companies and its work to defeat encryption systems. Those NSA efforts came to light in the past 15 months through leaks by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

He called on the U.S. Congress to pass controversial cyberthreat sharing legislation that would allow government agencies and private companies to more easily exchange information about attacks. Many privacy groups have protested the legislation, saying it would give government agencies, including the NSA, access to even more personal information held by private companies.

The cyberthreat information sharing bills in Congress have stalled this year because of privacy concerns.

We have to have a messaging framework and capability that shares information among sectors at network speed, Alexander said. Its technically feasible and something we should try for.

Alexander also suggested that too many companies rely on their chief information security officers (CISOs) or CTOs to keep up with the rapidly changing IT field and integrate what can be hundreds of IT products from dozens of vendors. One employee or small department cannot keep up with the changes and be expected to integrate all those products without exposing the company to cybersecurity risks, he said.

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Ex-NSA director Alexander calls for new cybersecurity model

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New docs show how Reagan-era executive order unbounded NSA

Further Reading A set of newly declassified documents shows definitively and explicitly that the United States intelligence community relies heavily on what is effectively unchecked presidential authority to conduct surveillance operations, as manifested through the Reagan-era Executive Order (EO) 12333.

And at a more basic level, the new documentsillustrate that the government is adept at creating obscure legalistic definitions of plain language words, like "collection of information," which help obfuscate the publics understanding of the scope and scale of such a dragnet.

The documents were first published on Monday by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) after the groupfiled aFreedom of Information Act lawsuit with the Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic at Yale Law School.

As Arsreported previously, "twelve triple three" is a presidential order that spells out the National Security Agencys authority to conduct signals intelligence, among other things. EO 12333 was amended three times under President George W.Bush. Famously, the NSAexpanded its domestic surveillance operation after the September 11 attacks without a direct order from the president, who later provided cover under EO 12333.

"These documents are a good first step to understanding how EO 12333 is being used," Mark Jaycox, a legislative analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told Ars. "We already know that it's used in a very similar manner to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which is being used as part of collection techniques that collect wholly domestic (American) e-mail. We also know [EO 12333 is] used for the NSAs interception of Internet traffic between Google's and Yahoo!'s data centers abroad, the collection of millions of e-mail and instant message address books, the recording of the contents of every phone call made in at least two countries, and the mass cell phone location-tracking program. The NSAand the White Housemust release more material on EO 12333. The President has encouraged a public discussion on the NSA's signals intelligence activities. He must follow through with ensuring an open, and honest, debate on EO 12333 activities."

In a rare instance of clarity and precision, a "legal fact sheet" authored by the NSA and dated June 19, 2013 explains various elements of EO 12333.

FISA only regulates a subset of NSA's signals intelligence activities.

NSA conducts the majority of its SIGINT activities solely pursuant to the authority provided by Executive Order (EO) 12333.

Since 1981, EO 12333 has provided the President's authoritative written instruction for the organization and operation of the United States Intelligence Community (IC).

An internal training document for a course taught with the NSA entitled "Overview of Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) Authorities" notes that:

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New docs show how Reagan-era executive order unbounded NSA

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NSA-proof iPhone 6?

By John Johnson

Newser

A customer holds his new iPhone 6 at an Apple Store in Augusta, Ga.(AP Photo/The Augusta Chronicle, Michael Holahan)

Apple says its latest iPhone has an encryption system that will keep users' emails and photos safe from the prying eyes of the NSA or any law-enforcement agency, reports the New York Times.

The company says its algorithm is so complex that if it ever had to turn over data from an iPhone 6, it would take the NSA about five years to decode it.

Even if Apple is underestimating the NSA's abilities, the principle isn't sitting well with FBI chief James Comey. What concerns me about this is companies marketing something expressly to allow people to hold themselves beyond the law, he says.

Comey cited the example of a kidnapping in which parents come to him "with tears in their eyes" and say, "'What do you mean you can't?'" The Times report also quotes security officials who predict terrorists will quickly embrace such technology, along with a tech expert who says law-enforcement concerns are being exaggerated.

In an earlier piece on the encryption by Matthew Green at Slate, Green says Apple isn't picking a fight with the government. "Apple is not designing systems to prevent law enforcement from executing legitimate warrants," he writes.

"Its building systems that prevent everyone who might want your dataincluding hackers, malicious insiders, and even hostile foreign governmentsfrom accessing your phone." What's more, "Apple is setting a precedent that users, and not companies, should hold the keys to their own devices." Google has similar protection available for Android phones, though the encryption is not currently a default option.

That will change with new Androids out in October. (In other iPhone 6 news, Apple said last week it's received only nine complaints about phones bending.)

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NSA-proof iPhone 6?

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NSA relies on 1981 executive order signed by Reagan

WASHINGTON Documents released by the government show it views an executive order issued in 1981 as the basis of most of the National Security Agency's surveillance activities, the American Civil Liberties Union said Monday.

The NSA relied on Executive Order 12333 more than it did on two other laws that have been the focus of public debate since former agency contractor Edward Snowden leaked files exposing surveillance programs, according to the papers released by the ACLU.

The ACLU obtained the documents only after filing a lawsuit last year seeking information in connection with the order, which it said the NSA was using to collect vast amounts of data worldwide, inevitably including communications of U.S. citizens.

The order, signed in 1981 by President Ronald Reagan, was intended to give the government broad authority over surveillance of international targets.

One of the documents obtained was a 2007 NSA manual citing the executive order as the primary source of NSA's foreign intelligence-gathering authority.

A legal fact sheet on the memo produced in June 2013, two weeks after Snowden's disclosures, said the NSA relied on the executive order for the majority of its activities involving intelligence gathered through signals interception.

Alex Abdo, an ACLU staff attorney, said in a blog post published on Monday that the documents confirm that the order, although not the focus of the public debate, actually governs most of the NSA's spying.

Congress's reform efforts have not addressed the executive order, and the bulk of the government's disclosures in response to the Snowden revelations have conspicuously ignored the NSA's extensive mandate under EO 12333, Abdo wrote.

Neither the NSA nor Justice Department, which is defending the lawsuit, responded to requests for comment Monday.

The ACLU's lawsuit, filed in December 2013 in New York, cited news reports indicating that, under the order, the NSA is collecting data on cell phone locations and email contact lists, as well as information from Google and Yahoo user accounts.

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Exclusive: Inside the NSA's private cloud

National Security Agency is building its private cloud on commodity hardware, opens source software

The National Security Agency (NSA) had a problem familiar to any enterprise IT manager executive: it was running out of space for hundreds of disparate relational databases that contain everything from back-office information to intelligence on foreign interests. And it needed to consolidate those databases to make it easier for NSA analysts to do their job.

The NSA's initial approach was to scale up capacity. But halfway through the process, the staff realized that simply increasing the scope of the network was not going to work. So, CIO Lonny Anderson convinced General Keith Alexander, who was then Director of the NSA and Commander of U.S. Cyber Command, to approve a move to the cloud.

Today, as the private cloud project continues to be rolled out, the agency is seeing the benefits. Tasks that took analysts days now take as little as minutes, costs have been reduced, and the management and protection of information has taken a huge step forward.

To learn about this effort, which dates back to 2009, Network World was invited to interview Anderson at NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Md. He explained that the goal was to create an environment sufficiently large to handle the data repositories and to ensure that analysts would have the user-facing experience of one-stop-shopping that the cloud can provide.

He also pointed out that the NSA effort is part of a larger migration of U.S. intelligence agencies to the cloud. In 2011, sequestration forced the Department of Defense to absorb ``huge budget cuts,'' says Anderson.

The agencies ``decided to economize by sharing IT services and thereby avoid a drastic slash," says Anderson. The NSA, CIA, National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA), National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), and Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) divvied up the responsibilities, with NSA and CIA handling the cloud infrastructure; NGA and DIA taking on the desktop; and NRO focusing on network requirements and engineering services.

In addition to saving on cost, putting all intelligence community data in the same bucket is enhancing the speed, depth and efficacy of their work.

Inside the cloud

Anderson describes the private cloud as "an integrated set of open source and government developed services on commercial hardware that meets the specific operational and security needs of NSA and Intelligence Community (IC) m IC DS1mission partners. NSA is part of an Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) effort to migrate to a community cloud that brings together NSA's cloud services with commercial cloud services at the classified level."

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Exclusive: Inside the NSA's private cloud

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Inside the NSA's private cloud

Dirk A.D. Smith | Sept. 30, 2014

National Security Agency is building its private cloud on commodity hardware, open source software

The National Security Agency (NSA) had a problem familiar to any enterprise IT manager executive: it was running out of space for hundreds of disparate relational databases that contain everything from back-office information to intelligence on foreign interests. And it needed to consolidate those databases to make it easier for NSA analysts to do their job.

The NSA's initial approach was to scale up capacity. But halfway through the process, the staff realized that simply increasing the scope of the network was not going to work. So, CIO Lonny Anderson convinced General Keith Alexander, who was then Director of the NSA and Commander of U.S. Cyber Command, to approve a move to the cloud.

Today, as the private cloud project continues to be rolled out, the agency is seeing the benefits. Tasks that took analysts days now take as little as minutes, costs have been reduced, and the management and protection of information has taken a huge step forward.

To learn about this effort, which dates back to 2009, Network World was invited to interview Anderson at NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Md. He explained that the goal was to create an environment sufficiently large to handle the data repositories and to ensure that analysts would have the user-facing experience of one-stop-shopping that the cloud can provide.

He also pointed out that the NSA effort is part of a larger migration of U.S. intelligence agencies to the cloud. In 2011, sequestration forced the Department of Defense to absorb ``huge budget cuts,'' says Anderson.

The agencies ``decided to economize by sharing IT services and thereby avoid a drastic slash," says Anderson. The NSA, CIA, National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA), National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), and Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) divvied up the responsibilities, with NSA and CIA handling the cloud infrastructure; NGA and DIA taking on the desktop; and NRO focusing on network requirements and engineering services.

In addition to saving on cost, putting all intelligence community data in the same bucket is enhancing the speed, depth and efficacy of their work.

Continued here:

Inside the NSA's private cloud

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